In the Hands of the Extremists

A superpower’s government is at a standstill because of a little bunch of radicals who refuse any compromise, preferring to take the country hostage to its ideology.

Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress have been unable to come to a budget agreement. The government had to close down and employees are thus forced to take an unpaid furlough.

The time ran out. Since Tuesday, America’s government no longer has the funds necessary to pay its employees and military forces. Now it has to decide which among them will continue to be paid as mission essential and who — at least temporarily — will have to continue to work without pay.

This affects not only millions of government employees; it essentially affects every American. The inability to pay the bills, should the impasse last for weeks, will have fatal consequences for the U.S. economy. It could further slow an already sluggish recovery and drive an already unconscionably high government debt level even higher.

Primarily responsible for this disaster is a tiny group of Republican ideologues in the House of Representatives who refuse any compromise. They’ve driven not only their own party to the wall, but the entire nation along with it. Unfortunately, the Republican mainstream leadership lacks the spine to discipline its extremists.

What’s currently going on in Washington could be the beginning of a potential catastrophe. It’s entirely possible that a new crisis will emerge in two to three weeks’ time, when Congress will have to decide whether or not to raise the nation’s statutory debt limit.

A New Economic Crisis Looms

And the ideologues plan to continue with their same tactics on that decision, too. If the Obama administration is unable to service its debt — whether debt owed to China or to its own banks — a new financial and world economic crisis looms.

One can debate whether the Obama administration is applying the right economic concepts, whether it perhaps should have begun economizing much earlier so this bottleneck could have been avoided. But the few dozen political hostage takers aren’t looking for better budget discipline and more consolidation of public finances. They only want to topple the health care reform they hate so intensely — and there is no limit to how far they are willing to go to achieve that goal.

But what does the one issue have to do with the other? Obamacare has been established law for some time and since midnight this past Tuesday, significant additional provisions have been added to it. Millions of uninsured Americans are now required to have health insurance, and companies over a certain size must provide their employees with insurance.

This general health insurance mandate is, for Europeans, a matter of course and practically a human right. But many Americans — and not just right-wing extremists — consider it a major threat to their personal freedoms and to their right to self-determination.

Americans Blame the Republicans

Congress passed Obamacare early in 2010. The president signed it into law; the Supreme Court has since ruled that it is constitutional.

Beyond that, a majority of Americans re-elected Barack Obama to a second term in 2012, despite (and in some cases because of) Obamacare. In short, every attempt by the right wing to get rid of Obamacare and topple the president has failed.

Up to now, it has been a political given that the opposition accepts the will of the American voters and waits until it can regain power via new elections. Following the Supreme Court decision, even Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner publicly said that health care reform was now the law of the land — period. No further discussion necessary.

But the ideologues don’t subscribe to that. Their strategy, with complete party approval, is that Obama only gets more funding provided he withdraws his reforms completely, or at least delays implementing them for a year.

That’s what the ideologues call willingness to compromise. In truth, it’s blackmail. They complain that Obama is unwilling to negotiate with them. But what is there to negotiate? Do moderate Republicans realize what they are doing?

There may possibly be a spark of hope in this tragedy. Most Americans rightly put the blame for their troubles directly on the Republicans. Maybe the Grand Old Party will eventually realize what they have wrought, curb their extremists and once again become politically viable.